Europe Travelblog  -

+ 3 - 4 | § ¶New pictures added!

I've added new pictures to the Germany section of this site.  They are from a weekend trip I took to Hamburg in May.  My wife, Jenny, was working for two weeks at a hospital in Hamburg testing medical devices for her company, Stereotaxis.  I joined her for the middle weekend of her business trip, and we had a great couple days.  We wandered everywhere, from the Reeperbahn to the Alster.  We were very lucky to be in Hamburg the weekend of the Hafengeburtstag, the celebration of the birthday of the Port of Hamburg, commemorating the date in 1189 when Emperor Barbarossa granted Hamburg the right to be a free port.  Hamburgers rightly celebrate the proclamation, which is the direct cause of Hamburg being a world-class port, even to this day.  Russian tall ships, street vendors, and general merriment ruled the weekend.

So please enjoy the new pictures!  There will be more pictures of Alaska soon, too.

+ 3 - 4 | § ¶Happy Birthday to Me

Today's my 29th birthday.  Back in Minnesota where I grew up, it would have been a big deal that this is my "Golden Birthday", meaning I turned 29 on the 29th.  It doesn't seem to matter so much here, but it's been a good day so far anyway.

My wife started the day well, by bringing a birthday gift to me from her and my parents, a Garmin GPS V!  I hadn't really thought about a GPS much before, but it's been fun to play with so far.  I used it to guide me to work this morning, but the base maps that came with it don't have enough detail really to be able to guide me in the city.  It comes with downloadable maps, though, so it should work ok.  Strangely, the download is through a serial cable, not a USB cable.  I'm very surprised.  Other than that, the GPS V has a lot more features than I expected, including a version of Breakout.  I really don't think I need a game in my GPS, but I guess it's no sillier than the games in my phone.

My birthday continued well, thanks to my co-workers.  We have a tradition of treating the birthday boy to a lunch of his choosing, but I took it to a slightly different level.  Usually, we go to Chevy's or another casual restaurant.  Today, I chose Clayton's Cafe de France, a formal French restaurant.  I'd never been, but the food was excellent.  I'll have to go back some other time with my wife to remember our trip to France in March.

It's been a good birthday, but now I just need to get through the workday to see what my wife's family has in store for me; they always go over the top, including making a bison pinata full of cheese a couple years ago.  I don't know what to expect.

BTW, I share my birthday with Benito Mussolini, Dag Hammarskjöld, Peter Jennings, Vida Blue, Marilyn Quayle, Martina McBride, Stephen Dorff, and Wil Wheaton.

+ 3 - 5 | § ¶SQL Formatter

I found a pretty nice SQL Formatter yesterday. It's an applet into which you can paste some SQL, and it breaks the SQL into multiple lines, indents it, etc.  It has a lot of options for coverting to uppercase, using pagebreaks, etc.  I haven't had any problems using it with FireFox on Windows, but a friend had trouble using FireFox on a Mac (he didn't have trouble with other Mac browsers).

There's another SQL Formatter that has a smaller applet.  However it doesn't provide nearly as many user options.  It is, however, very patriotic.

+ 3 - 4 | § ¶The Haugs have a fun trip

I just discovered that some of my friends from college, Scott and Cheryl Haug, had a great trip last year.  Check out their pictures of their bike ride from Vienna to Prague last October.  I've travelled in many different ways, but I've never travelled the countryside on a bike like that.  I'd love to.  Go Today has some bike tours on their site (including one for Vienna to Prague for $799 without airfare), but I think I'd want to do what Scott and Cheryl did - plan it for myself.  First, of course, I'd have to get in much better shape.

Congratulations to Scott and Cheryl for a great trip, but more importantly for their daughter, Annika, born in May.

+ 1 - 6 | § ¶10 Partisan Myths

In last week's Newsweek (yep, I'm behind in my reading), there was a very interesting article called 10 Partisan Myths.  It's an excerpt from Peter G. Peterson's new book, Running On Empty : How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It.  I'd love just to copy the whole article, but that'd be immoral and illegal, so I'll just highlight the five myths he claims each party holds dear.  The Democratic myths are about entitlements, and the Republican myths are about taxes. (more)

+ 0 - 7 | § ¶Should Bush replace Cheney?

There's been some speculation about Bush replacing Cheney.  With the issues of Halliburton scandals, the fabled link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the F-bomb, there are some good reasons for Bush to consider it.  Even more interesting is this poll by Newsweek (full details).

According to this poll (with all the caveats necessary for a single poll four months before the election), Bush/Cheney lose to Kerry/Edwards by 6%.  However, Bush/Powell and Bush/McCain win by 9% and 2%, respectively (Bush/Frist does even worse than Bush/Cheney).  Should Bush drop Cheney for Powell or McCain? (more)

+ 5 - 2 | § ¶Weekend at Mt. St. Helens

After spending the week at JavaOne, I spent a day touring San Francisco with a couple co-workers, and then I headed to Portland to meet up with Jenny, my wife.  A friend got married July 3 near Mt. St. Helens, and we also did some good hiking and spelunking.  We also got to see a lot of fireworks on the drive back the evening of the 4th.

The tour of San Francisco was fun, and we saw quite a lot.  We did the Alcatraz Tour and the San Francisco City Tour through Tower Tours, which wasn't quite what I expected.  There were two separate tours for $55; a bus tour of the city and a ferry ride to Alcatraz.  The bus tour was pretty good; the driver seemed to know the city well, and the route hit a lot of great highlights.  I was the only one in our group who had visited San Francisco before, so some was review, but I hadn't been to the Golden Gate Park or seen Haight Ashbury before.  There wasn't a lot of depth to the tour, but we saw a lot. 

Blue and Gold Lines actually does the trip to Alcatraz, so Tower Tours really was just a ticket agent.  I had never been out there before, so it was the highlight of the day.  I really enjoyed the audio tour of the cell block and the movies about the Indian occupation.  It's definitely worth the trip.  After the ferry ride back, we got sundaes at Ghirardelli, and then I got my stuff from the hotel to go to Portland.

After seeing an old friend from my days working at CSC, Jenny and I headed up to Anderson Lodge near Mt. St. Helens for a wedding.  My dear friend from college, Melissa Clark, was getting married.  She and Rowdy (his real name) were finally getting married.  It was a lovely ceremony in a mountain meadow with wild flowers.  Very fun.  There were also a lot of other friends from college there, which was great.


The next day, a bunch of us from the wedding went spelunking in Ape Cave in Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.  Ape Cave was created from a lava flow from Mt. St. Helens about 1900 years ago.  It was a lot of fun exploring the cave, although it's a lot different than the limestone caves we find in Missouri and neighboring states.  The walls are a lot harder because it's basalt, and there aren't many side channels or rooms to explore (the lava just went where it wanted: straight downhill).  We had to climb over a lot of rock piles created by ceiling collapses, and there was also an 8-ft wall to navigate.  Unfortunately, most of my pictures inside the cave didn't turn out.

After the lunch in Cougar, WA, Jenny and I went to the Windy Ridge lookout at Mt. St. Helens.  The view was amazing.  On the edges of the blast zone, many trees have recolonized the slopes, but much of the landscape near the volcano is still desolate and nearly devoid of life despite the 24 years that have passed since the great eruption.   I was especially surprised to see that there are still thousands of dead trees floating in Spirit Lake, after all these years.  Amazing.
   

On the drive home to Portland that evening, July 4th, we saw fireworks throughout Southwestern Washington and the Portland area.  It was a lot of fun to drive on I-5 and see five or ten fireworks displays around us.  Unfortunately, we had to head back to St. Louis the next day and go back to the real world of work.

+ 5 - 2 | § ¶Thursday JavaOne - General Session and Persistence

I've spent most of the day in the persistence world - quite a bit different than the desktop world of Tuesday.  The highlight so far was the Persistence Layers in an Enterprise Application: An Evolution from SQL to OJB to Hibernate session, but I'll get to that.

Gosling's morning session was fun.  The last entry in the t-shirt throwing contest was a big slingshot.  It was actually a manual slingshot, but there was a jsp that calculated distance based on force and angle.  It was kinda lame, but they threw out the most t-shirts.  I almost caught one, but I guess I'll have to live with the other four free shirts I got this week.  Additionally, there were a couple cool demos (plus another d*mn Studio Creator demo - why did I have to see Tor do the same thing for the third time on the main stage?).  The real-time reverse pendulum was really impressive, although the GUI was horrible.  Why can't cool technology and cool GUI intersect in the Java world?  Also, there was a tiny Jini application running on Bluetooth - it was interesting, but it's not in my world of interest now.  There was also a very hacky-looking "wearable computer."  The presenter (not Gosling) had it do automatic translation of a Chinese sign, but otherwise he just looked like a dork.

The cyclists won the t-shirt contest. Too bad that was the only one I didn't see.

High-Performance Java^TM Technology-based Software: Comparing the Results of a Common Design Implemented in Three Languages was ok, but do we really need another benchmark saying that Java's faster than people thought, though not always as fast as C?  There are so many benchmarks, and they really don't mean much.  Why should I care about this guy's?  Fortunately, he acknowledged these weaknesses, but why bother?

Building Data Access Objects (DAOs): Strategies and Lessons Learned was an interesting session given the transition our product has made.  They also found that Entity Beans were insufficient, but they went in a different direction than we did.  We went to OJB and Hibernate; they rolled their own.  They claim their approach was an abstraction of the DAO pattern in Core J2EE Design Patterns, but I haven't read the book, so I don't know.  They basically have one master Data Access Object that handles all the different objects, and they keep the metadata for the persistence in special tables.  Then, the developer invokes the metadata to specify the query needed, and the DAO does the rest.  It's an interesting approach, but I think the OJB/JDO/Hibernate approach is more generally applicable, especially since they haven't released their code.

Persistence Layers in an Enterprise Application: An Evolution from SQL to OJB to Hibernate was the most important session of the week.  Why?  Because my co-workers (Scott Delap, Amit Gollapudi, and Scott Gelb) presented it on the project for which I work.  I've seen one other post on it, and I hope there will be others.  I'm obviously too close to give an objective review, but I think it went well.  There seemed to have been at least 600 people in the room, and there were some in the overflow room.  The boys probably talked too fast, but I think most attendees thought they gave an informative presentation, and there were 19 minutes of good questions.  Impressively, Brian McCallister of OJB was there and didn't get upset, despite the message that we found OJB insufficient and moved to Hibernate.  I talked to him later, and he acknowledged that our criticisms were valid, so he couldn't mind.  It's nice to see someone here who accepts reasonable criticism. 

I just blogged through a JDO session, so I don't know if it was useful, and next I'm heading to a testing session.  Then, freedom and alcohol.

+ 6 - 1 | § ¶Wednesday evening at JavaOne

I hit a couple BOFs last night and also had a few drinks.  First, I went to the Meet the Java^TM Foundation Classes (JFC/Swing) Technology Team BOF.  It was good to see what the team are thinking, but I'll let Scott Delap summarize.  Much, much later, I went to the The FindBugs Tool BOF.  FindBugs is described as a bug pattern detector.  Basically, it looks at the bytecode (not source code) for bug patterns, from potential NullPointerExceptions to equals/hashcode mismatches to unused code.  It seemed to be a pretty interesting idea, but I'm not sure I'm going to bother with it.  I'm already using IntelliJ IDEA 4.5, and it has a heck of a lot of code inspections for Java, some FindBugs has, and some it doesn't.  In addition, I occasionally use PMD to check our code when i don't want to deal with any of the bugs we have in Jira, but I want to be useful.  FindBugs looks like it would be a useful tool in my arsenal, but it's not essential given the other tools I'm using.

Before the BOFs, Rich Unger and I went to the party for Sun Certified Java folk.  We got there too late for the giveaways and the event, but we got to talk to Bee Ng and get some beer.  Bee was shocked to hear that I downloaded the SCJD test in August 2001, but I've just never gotten around to finishing it (I almost finished while between jobs, and I haven't taken the time to finish up the RMI).  Maybe I'll finish someday, and I'll have to email her to make sure my submission doesn't get lost due to obsolescence.

Between the BOFs, I went to the Thirsty Bear for some fun and drinking.  While there, I met the infamous Hani Suleiman and "crazybob" Lee.  They seemed amazingly sane people for all the palaver they cause on the web.  A good time was had by all.